Brenna opened her door and turned to her father. "See? I set up a tiny lab."

Bruce entered the room, glancing around the cluttered space. "I see." He nodded. "I'm impressed. Fourteen years old with a laboratory."

"I'm grateful for the science kit," Brenna admitted. "I've had need to use it a lot."

"Hm." Bruce peered through the microscope. "You already have a blood sample in here?"

"Mine," Brenna admitted.

"Aha." He leaned back and looked at her. "How about we start tomorrow? I don't mean to put it off, but we could both use sleep before we start."

"Sounds good, Dad."

Bruce stood up. "I'm going to unpack." He headed to the doorway, but was stopped by Brenna, who threw her arms around her father in a hug.

He started, then hugged her back, thinking of all the years he'd missed.

~Can't feel a thing, can't feel at all~

Brenna Banner was a strategic problem solver who preferred the big picture to the mundane, and set high standards for herself. Her standards of late have been clear: Get rid of the Hulk. Her every waking moment when she wasn't at school was spent with her father developing a cure.

And yet they came no closer.

Even through their failures, Brenna enjoyed being close to her father, getting to know him better. They were similar in how hard they were to get close to, but these two, now no longer separated and working on one cause, connected.

She was still wary of course. Of herself. Of the threat of General Ross. Occasionally, a worry entered her head that the General might have tracked her father.

She'd dismiss it as soon as it came however.

Things were almost normal, until the day of Brenna's second hulk out.

~People they sat laughing at me~

It was her lab partner's fault, really. Or at least partly. During class, her teammate for the biology project wasn't listening.

Brenna knew that she didn't always include others in her decision making, but the modification she made to make their experiment work better evidently was the last straw.

Sybil Ward had been irritated at Brenna for this sort of thing before, mildly, but now she was really mad. She threw her hands up in the air. "Seriously, Brenna?! You could have told me!"

"I didn't think I had to. I thought it was obvious," Brenna said, backing away slightly, glancing at the project.

"Of course you did! You're so smart, I'm so dumb, I should've seen it before, O Intelligent One," Sybil cried. "We're lab partners. That means you tell me what you're doing. Communication is important!" She waved her arms, knocking a glass jar onto the floor. It broke, shards flying. Brenna put her hands in front of her face to block any bits of glass.

Sybil pushed at her.

Something inside Brenna told her that she was under attack.

Her body's protection system kicked in.

Brenna's eyes glowed green.